Questions for the PM

12:01AM GMT 15 Feb 2002

TONY BLAIR calls it "garbagegate". The "hooha" goes on, according to Number 10, because journalists simply cannot take in the simple, innocent explanation for what happened.

Very well. Let us take Mr Blair at his word. Let us try to understand how, in a perfectly ordinary, innocent way, the British Prime Minister came to endorse the takeover of a Romanian steel company by an Indian businessman, Lakshmi Mittal.

The first stage, apparently, is that the British ambassador to Romania, Richard Ralph, became very keen that Mr Blair should express his support for this deal. Straight away there is a puzzle.

Why should Mr Ralph have come to feel this way? No important British interest was involved. Less than one per cent of the workforce of the company was based in Britain.

The explanation given is that the ambassador was keen "because of the signal that this particular privatisation would send about the future of the Romanian economy in its transition from a closed, largely state-owned economy to one that was open".

But it was not a British company. Why should the British Government get actively involved? And when did you last hear of a relatively obscure British ambassador being able to persuade Tony Blair to sign a letter that he had dreamt up?

Our embassy in Romania drafted a letter for Mr Blair to sign which referred to Mr Mittal as Mr Blair's "friend". Why was this word used? No reason has been given.

Was the word an aberration? Or is it more likely that the writer had been given to understand that Mr Mittal was indeed a friend? Does the Foreign Office normally write to people about Mr Blair's friends?

Next, the word "friend" was removed by Number 10. On the innocent view, this was because someone there realised that Mr Mittal was not a friend.

Or was this striking out done by someone who knew that the word would let the cat out of the bag? Downing Street is also oddly reluctant to say whether Mr Blair does or does not know Mr Mittal personally.

Mr Blair signed the letter, taking "all of 30 seconds", in the words of his spokesman. But if the letter deserved so little attention, why did Number 10 take care to change the word "friend"?

The reference to "all of 30 seconds" was made early this week. But, more recently, the spokesman has referred to a briefing note accompanying the letter. So perhaps Mr Blair was not just signing blind - as indeed he should not.

In which case, did the briefing note make clear this was not a British company and that it had recently allowed an Irish steel company to go into liquidation with debts of £19 million?

Did the note warn of the risks of endorsing such a company when, if anything similar were to happen in Romania, Mr Blair and Britain would then be associated with it?

Did it point out that the Romanian government was relying heavily on British endorsement because, as was made clear at the signing of the deal, it had previously been worried about the credibility of Mr Mittal's company?

According to the innocent explanation, Mr Blair knew nothing of Mr Mittal's £125,000 donation to the Labour Party just before the previous month's general election.

It is surprising, to put it mildly, that he should not have known of one of the largest donations in recent years. And why did his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, who is involved in fundraising, not mention it?

Finally, there has been Number 10's reaction to questions on this matter. It has been a volatile mixture of bluster, indignation, attacks on others, untruths and refusals to answer.

He has been like a man whose wife finds a long hair on his jacket that is not the colour of her own - should he give a long explanation or just be outraged? But if he has an innocent explanation, why does he not give interviews, release relevant documents and allow the truth to shine through?

Instead, several early untruths have had to be taken back. It was first claimed, for example, that Mr Blair had signed the letter without any changes having been made. Like Jo Moore, Number 10 is having to admit that it previously misled us.

The innocent explanation of "garbagegate" is full of improbabilities. The most reasonable explanation of these events is that the letter was written by the Prime Minister of Great Britain to pay back a substantial donor to the Labour Party.